How Do Drugs Affect Creativity?

David Crosby was one of America’s most famous rock stars, a founder member of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Although never the most prolific of songwriters, from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, he wrote many of the era’s greatest songs, such as "Lady Friend," "Guinnevere," and "Déjà vu." However, by 1977, Crosby was addicted to freebase cocaine and heroin, and his songwriting stuttered to a complete halt. As Crosby put it, "As the drug use line went up, the music writing went down. And they were corresponding curves…It got so bad that I didn’t write anything for two years."¹

Chemical excess had a debilitating effect on many of Crosby’s contemporaries, too, such as Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, his bandmate Stephen Stills, and Jerry Garcia. And of course, a depressingly long list of pop stars have died due to alcohol and drugs, such as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis, Whitney Houston, and Kurt Cobain.

As a result of his experiences, Crosby was keen to debunk the myth that drugs enhance creativity. "The minute I stopped doing hard drugs then, BANG! the creativity came right back and I started writing again," he commented.²

Of course, there are many different varieties of drugs, which have different effects. Psychedelics appear to be most conducive to creativity. A recent study of psychedelics showed that they can enhance "higher creative potential," boosting cognitive abilities associated with creativity, such as originality and fluency. Research has uncovered similar findings across a range of psychedelic substances, such as LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca.

However, there are conflicting findings from other researchers. In a 2023 paper, a group of researchers at the University of Essex and Berlin’s Humboldt University examined hundreds of different studies and reached the finding that drugs—including amphetamines and psilocybin—generally do not enhance creativity.

Other Drugs and Creativity

Although there is some evidence that psychedelics can enhance creativity, there is no doubt that drugs such as cocaine, opiates, and alcohol have the opposite effect. In my view, there are three main reasons why these drugs damage creativity.

On the one hand, such drugs blunt our responses to our experience, dulling our awareness and emotions. Creativity is often triggered by emotion, as an outlet for sadness, longing, joy, or relief. When our emotions are dulled, creativity is no longer necessary. We become insulated against reality, with no need for an outlet.

Secondly, these drugs enclose us in our own minds, as if we’re trapped in a tiny attic room with no access to all the other floors and rooms, nor to the outside world. Drugs like cocaine and alcohol do this by strengthening our ego-boundaries. They inflate our self-importance and reduce our empathy. Opiates draw us into a cocoon of self-absorption, in which the external world practically ceases to exist. The effect of all hard drugs is the same: They disconnect us from the sources of inspiration. They stop us from receiving and transmitting creativity.

Thirdly, these drugs impair our rational and critical faculties. It isn’t just that we lose perspective, unable to distinguish between the brilliant and the half-baked—just as importantly (and partly because of the latter issue), we lose the ability to edit our work. The best creativity is a balance between inspiration and intellect. Inspirational creativity has to be controlled and directed by the conscious mind. But drugs reduce the mental sharpness required to prune away irrelevant or inferior sections, or to pare all our raw material down to the most effective form.

Creative Decline Due to Addiction

Drugs and alcohol have killed the creativity of countless other artists besides musicians. Authors like Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway all suffered creative decline due to their alcoholism, before dying as a result of addiction-related health problems (in Hemingway’s case, suicide). The 19th-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge underwent the same sad decline due to his opium addiction.

Perhaps part of the problem is that the heightened sensitivity of creative people may make them more prone to addiction. The sensitivity that opens them up to intense experiences and creative energies may mean that they feel emotions more intensely and are more sensitive to the sufferings of others and to social and global problems. In a related way, many artists’ creativity is linked to trauma. Their art serves as an outlet for their trauma, a therapeutic release of their inner pain. It’s therefore understandable that artists often resort to drugs to numb their psychological pain and trauma, despite the damage to their creativity.

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However, some of the most powerful creativity occurs when artists acknowledge and accept their psychological pain. Then a kind of alchemy takes place: Trauma and turmoil transmute into profound art. One of the best examples of this is John Lennon’s first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, on which Lennon channels his childhood trauma and present disillusionment into moving and beautiful songs. As Lennon sang on that album, "Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine/Nothing can harm you—feel your own pain."